The World

If only the world had a Stumble button

No matter how creative our thinking, and how diverse our range of experiences, we still tend to stick to familiar patterns.  Without thinking about it we go to familiar places, we meet with familiar people, we eat, watch, listen to and otherwise consume familiar inputs.  We are creatures of habit and this saves us from continually making millions of decisions every minute.  We decide what we like and we tend to end up with it, time after time. 

There is no better example of this than our use of the internet.  A typical internet user sticks to familiar paths.  They start from one site that they value and then follow links to others.  Or they begin with one effective search term and then follow down the stream of listings all coming from that search.  Either way, we end up finding what we are looking for because of the way it is linked to something we already know.  This is effective but limiting, because there are masses of information out there that that we know nothing about.  How do you search for something that you don’t know exists?  How can you hope to find something that is totally out of your field of experience.  If none of the sites that you usually visit link to a site then how will you find it?  If you don’t know or understand what is there yet, then it will be very difficult to search your way there.  Is there another way?

In much the way that you might stumble your way randomly through a forest and find new experiences, Stumbleupon helps you end up in all sorts of strange places with just the click of a button.  Instead of following familiar paths of search or links, by pressing the Stumbleupon button, you can end up miles from anywhere in totally unfamiliar territory.  What you find may be great or it may be terrible but that isn’t the point.  What we are talking about here is breaking out of patterns and finding exciting new directions.

If you are not familiar with Stumbleupon, it  is based on a simple little toolbar that you download  onto your desktop.  From there you can surf randomly (based on a number of categories that you define, if you wish).  If you press the Stumble button, you are instantly transported to a site or page that other Stumbleupon users have rated as worthwhile.  After checking out what is there you have the chance to evaluate it for yourself and then if it is any good, bookmark it and then Stumble on again.  In this way it is possible to visit a number of completely different internet neighbourhoods in a relatively short space of time.  Depending on how many topics you are interested in, it is possible to have some really revolutionary (if not altogether pleasant experiences) in only minutes.  Try adding Survivalist, or Counterculture or Medieval History to the topics you want to stumble and see how far your mind is stretched.  Better still, click the Stumble All Pages button and you could end up anywhere.  Last time I did this, I ended up reading an article written by Henry Rollins about weightlifting.  There is no way that I would have found this by following my conventional patterns, and I am not really interested in the topic itself, but reading it gave me a really interesting insight into the mind of some teenagers and what makes them work.  It took me back to what my life was like back then.  Most importantly it helped me see a very important principle about tools that  help us perform (I will write about that another time).

Randomizing your inputs in life can lead to all sorts of exciting discoveries as well as simply broadening your mind.  There is no better way to understand people than by experiencing parts of their world.  One way to do this is to use tools like Stumbleupon to view otherwise inaccessible parts of the internet.  If only the real world had a big Stumble Button on it.

My Stumbleupon name is Tomoleary.  Next time you are on Stumbleupon, introduce yourself and maybe we can help each other out in our Stumbling.

Thanks

Tom